Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  It didn’t take much for Chryssa to buckle under interrogation. Drag explained to her right away while she was waiting for her lawyer to arrive that if she didn’t tell him everything he needed to know, he would let her walk but she should expect me to pay her a visit, wherever she was hiding.

  Her confession was one endless j’accuse – how Themis had ruined his life and was about to ruin hers with his obsession for pursuing the pollution scandal. If only he had left well alone, he would never have got the attention of Vayenas and their lives would have been just fine. He did what he wanted with her. Forced her to go up onto the hill at night to see him, to give her a little bit of affection, and even that he would as often as not withhold. He would get the information about Vayenas he needed from her, find out if he was still trying to hunt him down, where he was looking, and then send her off home because he didn’t like to leave Emma alone, or else he was scared she would hear them and wake up. He made her feel worthless, just a pawn in a complex game he was playing with the world. He made her feel that if she stopped being useful to him, if she dumped the disgusting old man she could no longer stand, he would drop her like a shot.

  She suggested to Themis that they run away together, go abroad. She would sell up and with the money he had put by too they would be able to survive. They would work. They would have love. When she forced the issue he told her it was time for them to split up as they could not go on seeing each other so sporadically; it wasn’t fair on her to expect her to waste her life like this, seeing that he was not about to change the way he lived. His focus was on getting the money together to send Emma to America. Then he would worry about what he was going to do. For the moment, he had no idea. And when he saw that Chryssa still insisted on being with him under any circumstances, Themis told her to her face the fact that after six years together, he was not in love with her. That she was punching above her weight, that he was surprised she hadn’t realized that herself and that she was deluded if she thought they had a future together. Everything was a blur. She took the gun Vayenas had given her for protection and she emptied the bullets into Themis. The bruises and the burns they found on his body came later. Chryssa had seen a film in which the murderer had got away with it by muddying the case for the police by making them think the victim had been tortured to death. So she decided to do the same and went ahead, leaving signs of horrific brutality on Themis’ body.

  “You know what? I don’t regret it,” she said to Drag at the end of her confession.

  Remorse is a wonderful concept. Perfect for fairy tales. As long as it’s contained within them and does not confuse us as we grow older and start to believe that such a thing actually exists.

  “That doesn’t matter. You’ll have plenty of time for reflection in your cell – years, in fact,” he answered. At least that’s what he told me later when he gave me a courtesy call to thank me for having caught his murderer.

  Themis Raptas had managed to escape all those guilty enemies, who would not have hesitated to kill him, only to be murdered by the very woman he thought he was manipulating.

  31

  Teri phoned as soon as she was back from the Maldives. She wanted to talk about Maria, and I suggested we met for coffee. She refused. Even her voice sounded different.

  “There’s something I’ve never told you. Of the three of you, I was always fondest of you. I didn’t love you any more than the other two, but you were always very special to me.”

  Past tense.

  “And I thought I knew you; that’s what you think when you grow up with someone. So I never believed that you would behave like such a heartless, hypocritical, sexist pig. Maria made the ultimate sacrifice to be with you, and you left,” she said.

  “Have you finished?”

  “Yes.”

  I put the phone down.

  A few hours before that I’d been at the mall observing a new target. It was only luck that had prevented me from bumping into Maria, who had been there shopping. She hadn’t been alone. Drag was with her, and for the few seconds I permitted myself to look at them before I disappeared, they looked to me like they were having a lovely time. Together.

  A further eight months went past, bringing two lucrative contracts and only a few awkward phone calls with Teri and Drag, in which we all made sure that Maria’s name did not come up.

  That afternoon in the studio flat I was now renting, I felt the need to break the silence. I turned on my laptop and within a minute was on YouTube rewatching a video that had only been uploaded a couple of days earlier, but judging from the number of hits underneath, almost four million people had managed to see it. With a quick click I jumped the first twenty minutes of the show in which Fred, the tall, thin, well-turned-out fifty-year-old presenter, is doing his monologue before sitting down at his desk and giving a commentary on various photos and topical video clips. He thinks he’s funny, and judging by the audience’s laughter from the few seconds that they’d been watching him, they think so too. I had read about him online and how he had been drawing the largest prime-time audiences in America for years. I clicked the twenty-first minute. I was nervous. Nervous about watching a recorded show which I was watching for perhaps the hundredth time.

  Twenty-one minutes and seventeen seconds: Fred turns to the audience and announces an exclusive surprise guest. Emma comes into the frame, together with her translator, who is holding her by the hand. In her other hand she is carrying a white stick, supposedly to help her move about. The trick, she’d explained to me, is to make people think you’re weaker than you are. What the audience sees is a skinny young blind girl, and not the superhuman magician she keeps hidden inside. Fred asks her how old she is, where she has come from and what she is doing there. Emma answers, “You invited me here.” The studio audience, who until that point have been respectful and reserved at the sight of the blind girl, laugh out loud the minute they hear the translation. The camera pans over the faces in the amphitheatre and I briefly catch Angelino’s face in the crowd. Fred scratches his head as if to acknowledge that the girl has put one over on him. He explains to the audience that Emma is the gold-medal winner from the most recent Magic Olympics, and asks her to present tonight’s audience with her winning tricks.

  Emma duly picks out a member of the audience at random and asks him to come to the front and select a card. He does as instructed, and then replaces the card in the deck in a different position, shuffles and cuts. Emma then takes the deck and pulls out the card the man had picked. The judges at the Olympics had described Emma as “simply unbelievable”. But this is only the beginning. Once the applause begins to subside, Fred complains to Emma that it has taken so long to persuade her to come onto his show and that he has been begging her for ages.

  “But I wanted to be here today; on your lucky day,” she says.

  “Why especially today?”

  “Because if you go to any casinos at all today and play blackjack, you’ll win a lot of money.”

  “That’s great, because the money they pay me here …” replies Fred, and the audience dissolves into more laughter.

  The only person present who remains serious is Emma, even when she has the joke translated for her. Fred explains to her that she must be wrong because he has never gambled and won.

  “Perhaps your luck is about to change,” says Emma.

  A stagehand appears with a fresh deck, still wrapped in cellophane. Fred tears it open. The camera zooms in on the cards, showing that they are still in their original order. Emma asks him to shuffle and does not touch the pack. She then asks him to do it once, twice more. Some people in the audience are shouting out, saying that they want to shuffle too. Eventually Fred hands the cards over to Emma. She gives them one final shuffle before asking Fred to cut.

  “OK,” she says. “What we’ll do is this: we’ll play blackjack with a single deck and I’ll deal.” She then deals him four blackjacks in a row.

  “No way! No way! What are the odds of that happening? All f
our aces and the picture cards. I’ve just been told by the producers that the odds are less than one in ten million!” shouts Fred.

  “Shall we have another hand? See if I can win for once?” says Emma in a slightly aggrieved tone and looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The translator duly conveys this to Fred, who is happy to oblige. Emma deals a fifth blackjack even though all the aces have already been played.

  “What?” says Fred. Emma just shrugs her shoulders, gathers up all the cards and asks him to count out the aces. Fred counts them one by one as the cameras zoom in, and he only finds four.

  The audience gives Emma a standing ovation but, feeling more confident now, she turns to them, raises her arm to silence them and announces that she hasn’t finished. More laughter. The translator is lapping up the enthusiasm every time he translates something Emma says.

  Emma asks Fred for the deck, cuts it six different ways and shuffles it in as many again, hands it back to Fred to cut, asks him to shuffle it any way he pleases and to cut one last time. She picks the pack up in her right hand and tosses it up in the air. The deck spins round briefly before splitting in two mid-air. One half falls straight down and lands in Emma’s open palm and the other lands on Fred’s desk with the cards neatly arranged, one on top of the other. A fresh round of applause while Emma takes one pile and places it on top of the other before raising her hand to silence the applause again. Instant silence.

  She’s got them. Putty in her hands.

  “OK,” she says. “We have shuffled and cut these cards about ten times, so they should be really well mixed now, right?”

  Fred looks at her full of scepticism. He knows she is about to pull something on him but can’t see what. “Er … sure,” he replies.

  Emma turns the deck over to reveal that all the cards are in their original order, by suit and value, just as they had been when they came out of the box. The audience is ecstatic. The translator is now raising his arm too, loving every minute. Fred looks at Emma; he’s bowled over and applauds her too. Emma takes a bow.

  And for only the second time since I met her all those months ago, in what seems another life, I see her smile.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Once again, a gigantic thanks to Peter and Rosie Buckman. Charles Pappas’ book It’s a Bitter Little World (Writer’s Digest Books, 2005) was very helpful in double-checking certain movie lines in cases where my memory was reluctant to help.